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If you were following the #uNDC14 hashtag on Twitter last week you’ll have seen that despite our best efforts we didn’t manage to get the violence against women motions admitted onto the UNISON conference agenda.

What we did manage to do however was ensure the issue wasn’t ignored. By anyone.

First off, for those who aren’t conference geeks and who have no idea what some of the jargon in that Storify means, here’s a brief timeline of what happened:

On Monday 16th those of us involved in submitting the violence against women motions to UNISON’s National Delegate Conference met with the Standing Orders Committee (SOC). We had a wide ranging discussion with them that lasted just over an hour. They then adjourned to consider the arguments we’d put to them, called us back in, and told us they were sticking by their original decision.

Conference opened on the morning of Tuesday 17th, and one of the first things on the agenda was the SOC report to delegates. Part of the report dealt with the order of business for the week, and so those of us involved in submitting the motions (wearing our nice new t-shirts) challenged the report from the mic in a bid to get the SOC to reconsider its decision. Despite some of us (me) having the mic switched off on us (more than once), we managed to persuade conference to vote to ‘refer back’ the relevant section of the report, which essentially meant the committee was instructed by conference to go away and have another think about it all.

Later that day we met up again with SOC and had a further discussion. They then adjourned to consider our arguments, then rang one of us to tell us they weren’t budging.

Some of you may remember last year’s disastrous decision by UNISON’s National Delegate Conference (NDC) to reject an amendment in support of believing women who report male violence perpetrated against them: here’s a link to the piece I wrote at the time – UNISON Conference and the vote against women.

As you can see from that piece, a number of us who’d been involved in crafting the amendment went away from last year’s conference deflated but determined to bring the issue back this year. Indeed, the piece I’ve linked to ends:

“But rest assured, all of us who were involved in pushing for the amendment are conscious of how we fucked up, and we’re already making plans for how we get it back to next year’s conference. We know there’s work we need to do in the interim to raise levels of political awareness of the specificity of violence against women and girls, and we’re ready for and committed to doing that.”

Amnesty are obviously desperate to distance themselves from Fox, in fact they’re so desperate to distance themselves from him they’ve now put out two separate statements explaining his lack of involvement in anything to do with the new policy, sorry, consultation:

So, in light of all this recent interest in Fox I thought it was probably high time I got myself organised and did something with the nearly 2 hours of recorded interview that I’ve had sitting in a file on my computer for the past three and a half years. An interview that Julie Bindel and I did with Fox back in June 2010 that helped inform Julie’s recent exposé of the IUSW – An Unlikely Union – and that Fox himself wrote about on Harlot’s Parlour under the charming heading Julie Bindel is my Bitch.

In the interview with the BBC’s Daily Politics show Davies went on to say: “Even if the crimes, alleged offences, did take place, and he of course denies it, this is not an evil man in any sense at all, he’s a good decent man.”

Meanwhile, according to Michael White at the Guardian “a clammy hand on the knee” is not quite the same thing as “slavery, female genital mutilation and other horrors (that) are still widely inflicted on women,” and we probably need to all calm down a bit and get a sense of proportion, because, quite frankly old boy, “some of the language has been hysterical on both sides.”

So that’s that cleared up for us then.

As far as this narrative goes Lord Rennard is a good decent man even if he is guilty of crimes against women, because at the end of the day he’s not Jimmy Savile; and anyway, any offences he did commit couldn’t have been that bad because at the end of the day he didn’t enslave any women or mutilate their genitals….

Seriously, are these the best arguments the old boys’ network can come up with when defending one of their own? “He may have done a bad thing but hey, look over there at all these even worse things men do to women! Be grateful all he did was stroke a women’s knee or pinch her arse, cos if he’d been really really evil, like Jimmy Savile evil, he could have infibulated or raped her.”

"Those of us who love reading and writing believe that being a writer is a sacred trust. It means telling the truth. It means being incorruptible. It means not being afraid, and never lying."
Andrea Dworkin

"Sex-negative feminism consists of, what, Andrea Dworkin and that weird Cath Elliott woman at the Guardian?"
Someone on the Internet